State bar moves to tone down campaigns

The state bar association president has asked the two candidates for the Supreme Court to meet with a campaign integrity committee chairman before the race gets out of hand.

By Dana BeyerleMontgomery Bureau Chief

MONTGOMERY | The state bar association president has asked the two candidates for the Supreme Court to meet with a campaign integrity committee chairman before the race gets out of hand.Alabama State Bar Association Mark White is concerned that the race between Democrat Deborah Bell Paseur and Republican Greg Shaw will be consumed by negative campaigning like some past Supreme Court races that degenerated into back-and-forth charges of “Big Oil” and “trial lawyer” financial influence.The race had been relatively free of controversy until recently, when Paseur and Shaw began accusing each other of negative campaigning.“I don’t think it’s reached the point where it can’t be corrected,” White said Tuesday.White said he asked the candidates to meet with William Gordon, co-chairman of the bar association’s Judicial Campaign Oversight Committee.“My concern is in this Supreme Court race [that] candidates conduct their campaigns based on their merits and not get into the negative campaigns that we have had in the past,” said Gordon, a retired Montgomery County circuit judge.Paseur campaign spokeswoman Marion Steinfels said the Nov. 4 election should be decided on the merits of the two candidates.“We think that’s what the focus of the campaign is to be, and we will meet with anyone who will help get us back there,” Steinfels said.Shaw’s campaign spokesman Josh Cooper responded that Shaw has run a positive campaign and is already talking with Gordon and the committee.“This is a one-campaign problem, a Paseur campaign problem,” Cooper said. “Judge Shaw has run and continues to run a positive campaign, and we call on Deborah Bell Paseur to immediately stop her negative ads and apologize for the negative and misleading attacks being leveled against Judge Shaw.” Paseur and Shaw have run ads that feature contributions by representatives of oil companies as the central theme.Paseur is a retired Lauderdale County district judge and Shaw is a judge on the Court of Criminal Appeals. They seek to succeed retiring Republican Supreme Court Justice Harold See. A new wrinkle in the Paseur-Shaw race is the Alexandria, Va.-based Center for Individual Freedom has bought about $500,000 worth of television time in support of Shaw. His campaign said he has nothing to do with ads by the pro-business CFIF that seeks to “educate” voters, according to its Web site.Because the ads do not advocate voting for a candidate, the CFIF is not subject to campaign laws requiring disclosure of the source of the money, whether from business, trial lawyers or oil companies.University of Alabama political science professor Bill Stewart has been watching the race.“The campaigns haven’t degenerated to the point to what we characterize as dirty,” he said. “Back in the 1990s we had the skunk ad. This is very mild by comparison.” In the 1996 Supreme Court race, incumbent Justice Kenneth Ingram’s campaign compared See to a skunk, a new low for Alabama judicial campaigns and one that started calls for reform.